Good and bad News about Bitcoin

Monthly Archives: November 2014

The history of the Internet is filled with examples of individuals or teams trying to bring characteristics of physical currency to the digital realm.

Until bitcoin, nearly all prior attempts either failed or fell pitfall to issues related to centralization and crime, among others. Yet despite their stumbles, the examples outlined below may serve as a reminder that, like bitcoin, other concepts were able to attract significant media attention, a number of users and, in some cases, significant investor capital.

Joel Monegro has been part of the Union Square Ventures Investment Team since July 2014. Previously, he co-founded three startups, ran a boutique software development shop, and studied Computer Science and Economics.

The first thing Brad taught me when I joined Union Square Ventures is that one of the greatest things about working in the venture capital business is that you get to look at markets from a very different vantage point. Every day, we have the privilege to learn what the future is going to look like from the companies and entrepreneurs who are building it. It’s thrilling, especially if you’re technology geeks like we are.

Jonathan Levin is a digital currency consultant and entrepreneur. He previously co-founded and served as CEO of Coinometrics.

Payment systems are systems of pipes and valves that allow monetary transfers between people all over the world. To most, they sit insulated from view. Even when in plain sight they evade comprehension. With large responsibility for errors and lack of acknowledgement for progress, there has been little innovation and construction of new pipes. Bitcoin represents a new way to re-plumb the financial system on a decentralised architecture. However, much like the existing financial system, few people understand the consequences of the layout and design of its pipes.

For many entrepreneurs, one of the most compelling use cases of blockchain technology is the potential for it to enable new marketplaces that remove traditional hurdles associated with investing and crowdfunding.

The growing number of public crowdsales has been widely covered as of late. With these crowdsales, companies sell a branded bitcoin fork as a way to finance the early development of cryptocurrency-related projects. The popularity of many of the early crowdsales has sparked a conversation about where the burden of consumer protection lies.

For several years now, kindly volunteers have been contributing their spare computing power to vast, distributed supercomputers, all in the name of worthy causes.

Spare computing cycles have been used for everything from scanning cosmic radio signals for signs of extraterrestrial life through to calculating climate change scenarios. Now, a new project hopes to let people charge for their spare computing cycles.

Nov 30, 2014 gmaxwell commented on commit sipa/secp256k1@de5647e17a Not a problem with this patch, but previously. … what would have happend if R or S were >64 bytes here? 0_o (my fuzzing is limited to inputs of s…